One of the basic issues in user-software interaction is to deal with free text input.
People more and more expect to be corrected if they do typos.
Most of the big players like Amazon and Google who deal with user-input have already integrated quite good fault-tolerance into their systems.

Recently I started writing an add-on for gnod.net that is able to search gnod's ten thousands of artist names for
similar occurrences of a chosen name. It's still beta, but already produces results of quality similar to the search implemented by Amazon.

I'm not displaying the link to the test-page here. The algorithm is not yet completely optimized for speed, and
(dependant on the current search-depth settings) sometimes still needs too much processing resources, especially when
searching for terms like "a" or something. Guess you can imagine why :o)

In case you want to try it, please contact me, and I will mail you the link.

Update: since I did this code in asp, the textsearch live-demo is currently not available because I ported Gnod to php lately.